I was going to take a picture, but then he was gone. It was the oddest thing.
There is a feeder on the porch, and there is some fine black mesh hanging around there, which I guess gives them a little more cover from predators (I was not the one as hung it there). It looked like one of them had flown into the mesh too fast and got his beak stuck in it. He has totally motionless, his claws and beak in the mesh, his tail all spread wide. It looked like he got trapped and starved to death or something. When I first saw it, there were two others flitting around there.
Of course I went to get a camera. And of course he was gone. The mesh had a wet spot about where he had been, and there was a bird out there, flitting between some cables under the roof – a bird that I got closer to than usual, that did not seem wary of me. Either a predator/scavenger got to him, or he had been in torpor and somehow got loose after (or before) coming out of it. I looked to see if there was a corpse anywhere, but no sign of one.
www.audubon.org
